Whats stopping someone from using your code and starting another cloud hosted competitor that's identical to you? Is that against your license?
(Different from an entity downloading your software and self-hosting which you say is allowed)
(Different from an entity downloading your software and self-hosting which you say is allowed)
https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses
From their blog post:
> If you used AGPL-licensed code in your web service in the cloud, you are required to open source it. It basically prevents corporations that never had any intention to contribute to open source from profiting from the open source work.
> It explicitly prohibits corporations from parasitically competing with an open source project. They won’t be able to take the code, make changes to it and sell it as a competing product without contributing those changes back to the original project. [emphasise mine]
The blog post above was discussed heavily on Hacker News back in Oct 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24763734
Many projects are moving from an AGPL-like license to a proprietary license just to prevent this though. MongoDB, ElasticSearch, and just yesterday, Apollo Federation 2.
> We have a free as in beer Plausible Analytics Self-Hosted solution. It’s exactly the same product as our Cloud solution with a less frequent release schedule (think of it as a long term support release).
> Bug fixes and new features are released to the cloud version several times per week. Features are battle-tested in the cloud which allows us to fix any bugs before the general self-hosted release. Every six months we combine all the changes into a new self-hosted release.
[1]: https://github.com/plausible/analytics#can-plausible-analyti...